Goods and services providers often employ various forms of marketing to drive consumer demand for products and services. Marketing includes various techniques to expose to target audiences to brands, products, services, and so forth. For example, marketing often includes providing promotions (e.g., advertisements) to an audience to encourage them to purchase a product or service. In some instances, promotions are provided through media outlets, such as television, radio, and the internet via television commercials, radio commercials and webpage advertisements. In the context of websites, marketing may provide advertisements for a website and products associated therewith to encourage persons to visit the website, use the website, purchase products and services offered via the website, or otherwise interact with the website. In some instances, promotions are provided at specific geographic locations, such as billboards, visible signs (e.g., store-front banners), in-store displays, presentations, and the like.
Marketing promotions often require a large financial investment. A business may fund an advertisement campaign with the expectation that increases in revenue attributable to marketing promotions exceed the associated cost. A marketing campaign may be considered effective if it creates enough interest and/or revenue to offset the associated cost. Accordingly, marketers often desire to track the effectiveness of their marketing techniques generally, as well as the effectiveness of specific promotions. For example, a marketer may desire to know how many customers visit a website as a result of a particular advertisement. In some instances, marketers simply desire to know how user behavior is affected based on a location, regardless of whether or not a promotion is located there.
In the context of internet advertising, tracking user interaction with a website may be a reliable way of determining an effectiveness of a specific website advertisement. For example, website visitation paths can be tracked to determine how many website visitors “clicked” on a specific advertisement displayed on a webpage and, even further, how many of those visitors took a desired path, such as purchasing a product associated with the advertisement. In the context of other forms of advertisement, however, determining an associated effectiveness may be difficult. For example, there may be no reliable way to attribute a visit to a website and/or corresponding product purchase to a person's exposure to a roadside billboard, a visible sign (e.g., a store-front banner), an in-store display, a presentation, or the like.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide technique for determining an effectiveness of promotions at specific geographic locations, such as billboards, in-store advertisements, store-front banners, presentations and the like.